JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

Just because Rodney King said it so much more succinctly -- "Can we all get along?" -- was no reason to dismiss Bill Clinton's hour-long lecture last week.

The former president, introduced as perhaps soon to be the nation's first first husband, spoke at his presidential library to an invitation-only crowd of about 300 old friends. The occasion was the inauguration of a lecture series endowed by the family of a late Arkansas friend and supporter.

Clinton aimed for eloquence, depth, inspiration and world statesmanship. What he delivered amounted to something of a secular treatise on real and undefiled religion. That would be the loving and expansive kind, not the smug, exclusive, divisive, overly judgmental and altogether mean-spirited denominational versions we get in some sectors of modern America.

Alas, though, there's a fine line between the former president's aim and banal platitude. His lecture teetered thereon.

Here's what Clinton said, condensed well beyond the president's verbiage, if not to King's directness: All of us are about 99.9 percent the same genetically. What makes us different by gender and body formation and eye, hair and skin color is a mere tiny fraction of our makeup.

It makes no sense, then, for terrorists to cling to that mere tiny fraction to declare themselves wholly right and everyone else wholly wrong, thus deserving to be killed. We can solve our main challenges -- economic inequality, insecurity and our suicidal rate of depletion of natural resources -- if we gather the will through our human commonality.

As ever, he declared himself optimistic.

Probably Clinton's best supportive anecdote is his bosom buddyness with George H.W. Bush. They clashed vigorously in 1992 in electoral American politics, for which neither apologizes. Differences of opinion are vital and healthy, Clinton said. But now they pal around the world together warmly in humanitarian missions, even as Clinton occasionally criticizes, and as Clinton's wife daily criticizes, the presidential performance of Bush's son.

This may have been Clinton's most sensitive point: He and his audience would enjoy their commonality at a reception after his speech. "But somebody's going to have to come in and clean all this up," he said. Embrace your commonality with those folks, too, he said.

Clinton dazzled with facts and anecdotes, doing so in that familiar way no other American politician of our time rivals. He tells you the percentage of African children who die by age 5 from assorted tragic factors resulting from lingering Third World inequality. Then he throws in an anecdote about his gasping, literally, at the sheer beauty of an Indonesian child living among tsunami refugees -- only to be told that the child once had eight similarly beautiful brothers and sisters, but that all were killed.

His point was that tsunami victims embrace Americans because we helped them, unlike some who hate Americans because we invade, bomb, dominate or simply differ from them.

But, of course, you say. Tell me something else I didn't know, you scoff.

Still, it doesn't hurt to make the basic and obvious juxtaposition. If we kept such a simple principle in mind, it might help us avoid next time the kind of foreign policy and military mistake we seem to have started repeating.

Pleading that we stress our almost complete commonality rather than our microscopically marginal difference -- that may not accomplish a great deal to repair George W. Bush's mess in Iraq or make Israel's lot easier or replace fanaticism and terrorism with tranquility.

Yes, simple truth has been rendered naively impractical by the simple lies of our diseased world. But that's no reason to stop telling the simple truth. You might say it's all the more reason to keep telling it, and to cling

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.